Tag Archives: technology

During the past 24-36 hours, the major social media sites have been lit up by the news that Chobani, one of the major manufacturers of Greek yogurt, had quietly asked retailers last week to remove some of its products from grocery store shelves because of a problem with mold — actually a non-problem in their early recounting — in “less than 5% of its total production.”

I learned of this yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon when I came home with a four-pack of my favorite, the 3.5-oz Raspberry + Chocolate Chips. And then my wife noticed the “bloating” of the unopened-yet-unexploded containers….

For the past two years, I have checked in from time to time with bitly and added to my posts about what I found. What started as an amusing projection — how could the URL-shortening service evolve as they began to run low on 6-character hash strings? — turned somber, morbid, even sepulchral. Most recently, I wrote in The bitly dea(r)th watch that, because of Twitter’s DIY shortener, t.co,

…it was [now] less a matter of when bitly would run out of unique hash strings and much more a matter of when the world might run out of bitly. Would the dearth become a death, not to put too fine a point on it?

A week ago today, one of the people I follow on Twitter — Tom McLaughlan (@daruma) — caught my eye with these 76 characters, quoting someone else to be mentioned below: “I wonder how many writers get together to compare the pencils they use…?”

I should say, as only a bit of an aside, that the aforementioned Mr. McLaughlan is a superb photographer. You can see his “ministracts,” a concatenation of “minimalism” and “abstraction” of his own coinage, on his his website of that name and as daruma* on Flickr, which is where I first found his work several years ago. If you have glanced at the first two bullets on my About page, you will understand why his user name and his “wallgazing” set, respectively, got my attention.

For several years, I subscribed to the premium service of The Weather Channel, “weather.com Gold.” But some time early this year, it went missing, with no announcement or fanfare or whatever: “weather.com Gold is no longer available for new subscribers. Look for exciting new changes to come on weather.com in 2012.” Ok, then.